I had a house in the Karoo. In my late twenties, we renovated a beautiful old stone house from 1857, and turned it into a coffee shop and guesthouse in that bone-dry and devilishly warm town. As I was packing away tables and chairs on the stoep late on a Saturday afternoon, tired after a hectic day, this tall German woman showed up and asked if it was still possible to have something to eat. Her business card was this plain white card, only with her name, Eva printed on the one side and her telephone number on the other side. We ended up talking for hours. In the years following, we met up in the Tsitsikamma, Montreux, Paris, Barcelona, Schaffhausen, Zürich, Cologne, Karlsrühe, Basel and Amsterdam, often ending up talking for hours. We became witnesses to each other’s lives. We talked about finding our career paths, spirituality (she followed the path of shamanism), our bodies and ailments, literature and art, the relationships with our parents, the trauma of muggings, the upheaval in intimate relationships….how to make sense of these worlds we live in.

Once we met in Adelboden, high up in the Swiss Alpes. She gave me a book by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl and the philosopher of religion, Pinchas Lapide, both survivors of the holocaust. This book was based on recordings of conversations between these two friends from 1984 that for years lay hidden in the Frankl archives until it was discovered in 2004. It was only published in German under the title, “Gottsuche und Sinnfrage” [the search for God and questions around meaning]. On the inside Eva simply wrote – “for Jacob, who wants to find meaning”. Don’t we all?